Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday July 06, 2012 @04:21PM
from the neo-victorian-deus-ex dept.

Dishonored is an upcoming first-person action-adventure game in a steampunk setting. It's being developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. As the game nears its October 9th release, Jim Rossignol of Rock, Paper, Shotgun got some hands-on time with the game, and was impressed by how it is shaping up:
"The level I played saw me overpowering a government official from his laboratory high on a building above the lavish pseudo-London cityscape, and lugging him out to a riverside rendezvous. Initially I went in through the front door, bluntly killing the guards with a knife and sneaking inside. But I could have used all manner of other entrances, and other powers. I could have slipped in undetected by distracting the guards. I could have possessed a rat – zooming into the hapless thing in a manner of bodily possession/transformation reminiscent of forgotten FPS Requiem: Avenging Angel – and then rematerialized once I’d run in through grates and rat holes. I could have possessed an NPC and used the meatsuit to pass through the energy-field barricades. Or I could even have employed a short-ranged teleportation power, blink, and leapt and mantled my way up across the rooftops."

No, not exactly. What he's saying is that only one author should write books set in a magical land with wizards and dragons, and while that author could write a whole series of such books, no other author should have wizards and dragons in their books. So I guess that means any fantasy author other than Tolkein sucks and can't come up with their own ideas. Then again, I'm pretty sure Tolkein didn't invent dragons and wizards all by himself, so you shouldn't give him a chance either, let alone all the other fantasy authors.

Same goes for space-based sci-fi. Whoever the first author to dream up a sci-fi book involving aliens on another planet was, all others after him suck and can't come up with their own ideas, so you shouldn't bother with them. I'm guessing that means only HG Wells is OK.

The difference is that steampunk is not defined by setting, but rather by use of devices that defy science (even future science). I don't think of it so much as a genre, but as an excuse for poor creativity.

Steampunk, list most subgenres within the science fiction/fantasy umbrella, has little or nothing to do with the technology described... it's a backdrop for the story actually being told. Done well, it's fun and whimsical. Done badly... well... ever seen Wild Wild West? If you're getting hung up on the "science" of it, you're missing the point completely.

It's called "suspension of disbelief".
Steampunk, list most subgenres within the science fiction/fantasy umbrella, has little or nothing to do with the technology described... it's a backdrop for the story actually being told.

I must point out that "suspension of disbelief", in most circumstances, only works if the system gives the initial impression of being internally consistent. So no writing a story about wizards and magic and then having the protagonist nuke the villain in the last five pages. The a

And then there is the cash grabbing series written by his son and Poul Anderson because they needed more money.

Actually it might have started with good intentions, but that didn't last past the first series. Well, maybe not good intentions, since his books always seemed more based on the David Lynch movie than his fathers books...

And I don't get how people can use the word "frack" unironically (and outside of the oil industry). But you learn to suppress the vitriol and just pass on by. Let the steamfolks be, because we all have our own quirky little vices.

Ok - so one series of books in such a setting by one author - I can accept. A whole fracking genre?

Sreampunk tech is fun to draw and fun to animate, with a lot of personality --- but little that is magical or over-powering.

You can see how the machine works.

Things tend to move within a late Victorian and Edwardian world. That has always been an extraordinarily rich lode to mine for the writer of pulp fiction, the weird tale, and the classic adventure story.

The fantasy RPG looks back to the myths and legends of an distant and comforting agrarian past. You'll find damn little of that in Lovecraft or Doy

I played with steam engines as a kid. I made miniature hot-air balloons, with candles and large thin paper bags. I rebuilt car and bike engines as an adult, because I understand how these things work. I don't understand electrons. I don't really know how my PC works - I built it, but it was just a question of assembling the components in the proper order and loading up a ton of software that someone else wrote. When it goes wrong, my only usual recourse is to switch off and on again, and in severe case

Imagine hundreds of books set in the Dune Universe or the Star Wars Universe or Cory Doctorow's shitty wet dream of a universe he calls a novel...... crap.

There ARE hundreds of books written in the Star Wars Universe. And there are hundreds written in the Star Trek Universe.
But you know what is worse, there are THOUSANDS written in the real universe. OMG! The horror! Imagine all of the unimaginative novels written by authors that suck and couldn't come up with their own ideas, so they wrote about our own real universe.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the way that pop culture works. The first wave is exciting, new, and creative. The second wave is a refinement that may or may not sell out to the mainstream. The third wave is cheap and crass commercialization, almost entirely populated by hacks and fad-chasers. Around this time, all the hipsters will abandon it, and your parents (or even grandparents, if you're young enough) will start making references to it. My 60 year old mother talks about preparing for the "zombie apocalypse", when she goes out shopping for canned food. All you can do is grit your teeth and wait for the fourth wave, which is an ironic deconstruction. This will bring the hipsters back, unfortunately, but it will also cause people to recognize how intensely stupid and insipid the third wave was. Hopefully. After this, it can go in any direction, and there have been some cases where the ironic deconstruction was misinterpreted and turned into a big influence on the genre.

Roger Corman once dismissed the term "genre film", saying that people who use that phrase are simply unable to admit to themselves that they're making exploitation movies. This is why I like Roger Corman's work: he knows that he's making crap, and he doesn't have pretensions toward art. He's very self-aware. As long as we have people producing "genre fiction" or "genre films", we'll have hacks with delusions of artistic merit barfing out insipid, derivative work. This tends to pop up in the second wave of any fad and dominate the third wave.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the way that pop culture works. The first wave is exciting, new, and creative. The second wave is a refinement. The third wave is cheap and crass commercialization, almost entirely populated by hacks and fad-chasers. Around this time, all the hipsters will abandon it, and your parents will start making references to it.

When did this start? Game previews (especially ones this far out) are a total waste of time. They're controlled by the publisher, and positive 100% of the time. It's nothing more then free PR for the publisher.